Enter your mobile number or email address below and we'll send you a link to download the free Kindle Reading App. Then you can start reading Kindle books on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.

Comment: Book is in very good condition. It may have some slight wear and possibly include a previous ownerâ€TMs name. We ship within 1 business day and offer no hassle returns. Big Hearted Books shares its profits with schools, churches and non-profit groups throughout New England. Thank you for your support!

Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) is a service we offer sellers that lets them store their products in Amazon's fulfillment centers, and we directly pack, ship, and provide customer service for these products. Something we hope you'll especially enjoy: FBA items qualify for FREE Shipping and .

10 BEST BOOKS • THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW • 2011NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BYThe Washington Post • The New Yorker • Chicago Tribune • The Economist • Nancy Pearl, NPR • Bloomberg.com • Library Journal • Publishers Weekly

Acclaimed historian Amanda Foreman follows the phenomenal success of her New York Times bestseller Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire with her long-awaited second work of nonfiction: the fascinating story of the American Civil War and the major role played by Britain and its citizens in that epic struggle.

Even before the first rumblings of secession shook the halls of Congress, British involvement in the coming schism was inevitable. Britain was dependent on the South for cotton, and in turn the Confederacy relied almost exclusively on Britain for guns, bullets, and ships. The Union sought to block any diplomacy between the two and consistently teetered on the brink of war with Britain. For four years the complex web of relationships between the countries led to defeats and victories both minute and history-making. In A World on Fire, Amanda Foreman examines the fraught relations from multiple angles while she introduces characters both humble and grand, bringing them to vivid life over the course of her sweeping and brilliant narrative.

Between 1861 and 1865, thousands of British citizens volunteered for service on both sides of the Civil War. From the first cannon blasts on Fort Sumter to Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, they served as officers and infantrymen, sailors and nurses, blockade runners and spies. Through personal letters, diaries, and journals, Foreman has woven together their experiences to form a panoramic yet intimate view of the war on the front lines, in the prison camps, and in the great cities of both the Union and the Confederacy. Through the eyes of these brave volunteers we see the details of the struggle for life and the great and powerful forces that threatened to demolish a nation.

In the drawing rooms of London and the offices of Washington, on muddy fields and aboard packed ships, Foreman reveals the decisions made, the beliefs held and contested, and the personal triumphs and sacrifices that ultimately led to the reunification of America. A World on Fire is a complex and groundbreaking work that will surely cement Amanda Foreman’s position as one of the most influential historians of our time.

{"currencyCode":"USD","itemData":[{"priceBreaksMAP":null,"buyingPrice":22.47,"ASIN":"037550494X","isPreorder":0},{"priceBreaksMAP":null,"buyingPrice":21.65,"ASIN":"1596917024","isPreorder":0}],"shippingId":"037550494X::ZD4%2F6ug6uz9POr5gRRJkZ%2BCEVSIzp1f4DH%2BtvYA%2BofTjwFU3fcnRnVTafbGq9lxGg30LoaTkSeGhXqzMFJooCTwfH9a2YUKgT8VW8SdrhvZDy8gbPX7tkw%3D%3D,1596917024::vFuXGkdM%2Bt6fSLgXzJ0ctVmgPTkVoWrdIvdYb5pSIAhKc%2Fmj74DAY0nstVhc%2FVY07Z2U7uMgXkjra7ISLT8nIWNzAIF%2BBHmsgamdmddfivcj8U3n0KPqwA%3D%3D","sprites":{"addToWishlist":["wl_one","wl_two","wl_three"],"addToCart":["s_addToCart","s_addBothToCart","s_add3ToCart"],"preorder":["s_preorderThis","s_preorderBoth","s_preorderAll3"]},"shippingDetails":{"xy":"same"},"tags":["x","y","z","w"],"strings":{"addToWishlist":["Add to Wish List","Add both to Wish List","Add all three to Wish List","Add all four to Wish List"],"addToCart":["Add to Cart","Add both to Cart","Add all three to Cart","Add all four to Cart"],"showDetailsDefault":"Show availability and shipping details","shippingError":"An error occurred, please try again","hideDetailsDefault":"Hide availability and shipping details","priceLabel":["Price:","Price for both:","Price for all three:","Price For All Four:"],"preorder":["Pre-order this item","Pre-order both items","Pre-order all three items","Pre-order all four items"]}}

Review

The Economist, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The St Louis Post-Dispatch, Publishers Weekly and Library Journal all list A World on Fire as one of the best books of 2011!

"Ms. Foreman...is such an engaging writer that readers may find this 958-page volume too short."—Michael Burlingame, The Wall Street Journal

"Extraordinary cast....Thoroughly researched and well written...Remarkable."—Geoffrey Wheatcroft, The New York Times Book Review

"One puts down A World on Fire with a sense of awe. Foreman's skills as historian and writer are formidable."—The Boston Globe

"Foreman's descriptive gifts show especially well in bringing vividly to life the political and diplomatic worlds of Washington and London...A brief review can only hint at the expansive scope, rich detail and pulsing energy of A World on Fire."—The Washington Post

"[A] magisterial history."—Newsweek

"So expansive in its scope, and so well written...to call it a masterpiece somehow doesn't seem to do it justice."—Christian Science Monitor

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

Amanda Foreman's " World on Fire" twelve years in the making and over 900 pages long, is not for the faint-hearted. It is not "Gone with the Wind" or "War and Peace" as some reviewers have suggested. There are no page-turning romances and women are very minor characters. But for the hard-core history buff, "World on Fire" is in some ways better than these great classic novels. It's plot zigzags among 200 characters -- including farmers, soldiers, cartoonists, politicians and labor leaders. It is gritty, off-center, more alive and more disturbing than these broad ranging novels. Unsentimental and a take-no-prisoners, bracing writing style, "World on Fire" is a work of great richness and descriptive power, a complex treat for those with strong concentration powers who don't mind an often confusing and abruptly changing plot strewn with dozens and dozens of unknown characters.

Foreman's research is prodigious,forthright and robust. It includes eye-opening accounts of poorly planned advances by both Union and Confederate armies, equipment pieced together like childrens' toys, and as always in war stories, countless vignettes of scared, hard-charging soldiers who are ultimately blown apart because of bad officers and bad equipment.

The British part of this story has been, for the most part, untold and unmined. Britain's political elites make it their business to constantly upbraid Lincoln and his Secretary of State, William Henry Seward. Above all, despite loftier proclamations against slavery, they don't want their lucrative cotton business ruined with the South and its slave labor.Read more ›

Amanda Foreman first demonstrated her ability to bring history to life with her biography Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. Now she has surpassed herself with A World On Fire, a magnificent history of the American Civil War and the highly important part Great Britain played during it. Most Americans who have an interest in the Civil War period will already know that both the North and the South courted British support during the conflict, and that many British subjects were either strongly pro-Federal or vehemently pro-Confederate. But few will have realized the extent to which the war dominated British politics during the 1860s and the amount of British money and the numbers of British people who took an active part in the conflict. Nor will many British or American readers have understood until now the extent to which the Civil War and Britain's response to it shaped the "special relationship" the two nations have enjoyed for over a century.

In the years before the shooting started Britain and the United States had a troubled history. Britain played a major role in the US economy, particularly through the large amount of cotton she purchased each year for her textile mills. Neither fully trusted the other. Boundary disputes over the US Canadian border and other arguments dating back to the Revolution kept Anglo-American relations tense. The election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 brought matters to a head, first because it led the South to secede and start to fight for its independence, and second because of Lincoln's appointment of William H. Seward as Secretary of State. Seward was ambitious to see the US grow and looked longingly north towards Britain's North American possession, Canada.Read more ›

Although the title of the book surely suggests that the focus will and should be on what was happening in Britain during the civil war, in fact this is mostly simply another comprehensive work on the civil war with slightly more information about Britain's view of the war than most. The best parts of the book for me were indeed those that describe what was happening in London, both in the government and in the American diplomatic mission there and what was happening in the British legation in Washington headed by Viscount Richard Lyons. Those parts represent, however, but a small portion of the book.

Instead, the main focus is on the various battles that were raging across America that made up the civil war. This is information already available in many ways, in particular through James McPherson's seminal works on the civil war. The author brought in the British card by including discussions of actions of subjects of the queen who had come over to the United States to fight in the war. Indeed that individual penetration added interest to the book in the same way that Steven Ambrose's discussions on what specific individuals were up to added interest to his books about the Second World War. But the story was really just about what was happening in America and the fact that some of the described players were of British origin was not, in my mind, a story about the British effect on the war.

The Trent affair towards the beginning of the rebellion where the North and Britain almost came to war because of the captain who removed two Southern envoys to Britain from a British vessel, was dealt with at length. That part of the book was in point to the title, well written and very interesting.

Overall, the book was entertaining and written well, just too long and mostly off topic. I would have been happier with a book about a quarter to a third of the length that really focused on Britain's role in the civil war.

More About the Author

Amanda Foreman is the author of the award-winning best seller, 'Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire' (HarperCollins UK; Random House US), and 'A World on Fire: A Epic History of Two Nations Divided' (Allen Lane UK; Random House US). She lives in New York with her husband and five children.

She is the daughter of Carl Foreman, the Oscar-winning screen writer of many film classics including The Bridge on the River Kwai, High Noon, and The Guns of Navarone.

Amanda was born in London, brought up in Los Angeles, and educated in England. She attended Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University in New York. She received her doctorate in Eighteenth-Century British History from Oxford University in 1998.

'Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire' was a number one best seller in England, and best seller for many weeks in the United States. It has been translated into French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Danish, Hungarian, Romanian, Croatian, Turkish, Korean and Mandarin Chinese. The book was nominated for several awards and won the Whitbread Prize for Best Biography in 1999. It has inspired a television documentary, a radio play starring Dame Judi Dench; and a movie, titled 'The Duchess', starring Keira Knightly and Ralph Fiennes.

In addition to regularly writing and reviewing for newspapers and magazines, Amanda Foreman has also served on a number of juries including The Orange Prize, the Guardian First Book Prize and the National Book Awards.